environmental rating series of weekend by a college unit thanking her cosponsors, the environmental studies department here at mount holyoke and the odyssey bookshop -- [applause] our very own independently owned bookstore right here in south hadley, joan graybeard and her team to a fabulous job in every way and that includes bringing announcers to speak to the community. they undoubtedly make mount holyoke a much richer place. thank you so much. [applause] has been mentioned, this is our second event. our third will be on monday, november 7 and will be captain charles moore, reading from and discussing his book, plastic ocean: howie sea captain chance discovery/victor turman questions devotions. moore is one of the first identify the huge sharp plastic trash in the middle of the north pacific and he will be here to tell us his story.

also on november 10, distinguished environmentalist will be presenting the annual miller warley environmental leadership lecture here and in the letter taurean. in one impressive resume, including the founder of natural resources defense council, the chief environmental adviser to jimmy carter and administrator of the united nations development program. his talk entitled american prospectcommit a kind of rebirth and promises to be both provocative and inspiring. some special thank you tonight to lorette civilly and environmental studies. [applause] our student volunteers, olivia dirks, paula mignon en et mullane. and also to read the mandates, our tireless enemies and program coordinator at the miller warley center for the environment. [applause]

has always come a huge thank you to a gracious donors, leslie miller and richard warley's generosity makes events like this possible. frances moore the pay is the author of 18 books, including the classic diet for a small planet. she's the cofounder of three organizations, including food first, institute for food and development policy and more recently small planet institute, collaborative network for research and popular education seeking to bring democracy to life, which she leaves with her daughter, anna lepage. right of center ducker cofounded the small planet fenwick channels resources to social movements worldwide. frances appears weekly as a public speaker and on radio and a regular contributor to "huffington post" and alternet. her most recent work released by nation books at september 2011 is geico might come a change in the way we think to create the world we want. jane goodall called the book powerful and inspiring.

geico might open your eyes and change your thinking. i want everyone to read it she said. other recent books include getting a grip, clarity creativity encouraged in a world gone mad and getting a grip too, clarity creativity encouraged for the world we really want. hope's edge written with anna lepage. democracy's edge and you have the power, choose encouraging a culture of fear. books are then translated into 50 languages and are used widely in university courses and her influence is so great that it's strictly impossible to measure. her very happy to have her here tonight. frances moore lepage. [applause] >> thank you so very much. thank you, 10. thank you odyssey bookstore, especially students had the pleasure of meeting via skype just a few days ago and just really fired me up.

sit thank you for being here tonight. i would like to begin my top tonight with the words that seahawk in his book, very good security cage. t. hock says it is far too late and things are far too bad for pessimism. and that's the spirit does "ecomind" in the spirit i try to maintain when i get up in the morning. so i know the plate to begin with where the journey that brought me here on this treacherous drive from boston actually began 40 years ago. it began when i sat at the you see berkeley agricultural library as a twentysomething. with this intuition that food is so basic. everybody has to be. and if people aren't eating, but

it's more important than that? and if i could just understand what is their in the world, that would begin to unlock the mysteries of economics and politics. so, the book sake population bomb exploded, the experts are telling us we'd run out of food and i wanted to know, is that true? so i sat there i must literally putting two and two together. very soon in this process they learn that no, there's more than enough food for all of us. it is true then. even more true today. worse, i learned we are at tivoli creating the scarcity that we say we fear. so my question group. by hunger? then why hunger to world of plenty? been applied to such a thing? and the nick berg grew over decades to the my life in this

new book, "ecomind." it's the question, why we together created the world that we as individuals would never choose? because i know and they know you know no one who gets up in the morning turns out the alignment says yes i want another child to die today of hunger. this is the, michael is to make sure the planet gets hotter and species are lost forever. i don't think that's going on. so that seems like a pretty big question. why are we together created the world that not only would we not choose, but actually violates our common sense and our deepest sensibilities as human being. so that really is the question. over the decades i've had a lot of help from a lot of great thinkers. and finally began to dawn on me, certainly one particular thing eric from what the book, the anatomy of human destructiveness and that's what it really began to click that if we think about

how we got into the place we are, that we have to look at what is unique about the human species. one of the things is how we think, how we see. that unique quality of the human mind as we see the world according to a mental map that we have soared in its culture. each culture develops a way of seeing life and what really we can see with outside of our mental map. they thought. but a filter. this is wave mindworks. to. to make a case i want to take you to my kitchen last thanksgiving. i got up really charged up to make my favorite root vegetable dish that morning. i knew 33 people were going to be in my living room in the afternoon so i better get busy. so i started looking for my favorite dutch oven to cook by root vegetables. i looked in the cupboard where i was sure it was when i wasn't there. so i went to the basement and came back up and looked at the

upper shelves and couldn't find it. i got so frustrated and wondered who i find it too. i finally gave up. about an hour later he turned around and there it was, except i put the plant in it. last night so i think hopeful you kind of cavanagh and getting i care is that i was looking for a kitchen item, right? it's not inconspicuous. it's a red and i couldn't see it because i'd converted into a planter, simply by putting a plant and it might put it into another frame. i couldn't see it from the kitchen frame. so, this is our challenge. and this aspect of our mentality, the way we see is perfectly fine. it's the dominant way we see. it's the mental map we absorb. but my thesis tonight is the map

that we absorbed unconsciously in our culture is fundamentally a life denying. and that explains a lot about why we are in the mess we are in and the challenge that is very clear. is it possible for us to peek into service, to acknowledge the dominant map that is taking us down and began to shape a more life-saving mental map? one that is aligned with all we know about science, nature and human nature. that is the challenge. so what is this dominant map? zero, i think it certainly carries the assumption that you and i are all separate from one another. or separate from nature. we are just these distinct entities, often a competitive schedule. i never did that separateness cannot struggle it is the premise of black, not enough. not enough of anything.

i called the premise about the good tomato goodness because there's not enough energy, not enough food, not enough parking places in boston. not that anything. and there's not enough goodness in us. he peel away the fluff, what we like to think and get down to what we really count on. you believe we've come to assume that that is self-interest, competition and materialism. that's what we can really count on. know what i would like to do is if you cannot have a spare sky to at the center, this motivating forces the premise that set this in motion. so from the premise of black, from the sense of ourselves, lack of good, then resell the shoppers are in competition over scarcity. now from that premise, we can't

they think that we are able to come together in common problem-solving to deliberate together and come up with what works for the whole. no, no, were not capable of that. so what do we do? we believe. we fall for the notion that we have turnover or faith, turnover social outcomes to something that works on its own without us, something that's infallible if not magical force. ronald reagan used the term magic to refer to it, the magic of the market. i messed up those human beings we don't get involved. we just let it do its magic. unfortunately, the markets had served humanity for eons and eons of time, we've hit upon this peculiar idea for a particular market that it can result in the nine outcomes for all of us history than by one rule. high street turned to existing

wealth. people already own the shares in the company and run them. so from that premise, what happens then is that what occurs to wealth increased about the increased wealth until we reached the point that i just checked out today with a letter fact and how it all worked out mathematically. we reached the point where 400 americans control as much wealth as the bottom 50% of the american population. citigroup researchers called a platonic for the top 1% control as much as the bottom 90%. and that is where the occupation wall st. 1% language comes in. so what happens then? we start with the premise of luck. we turnover our feed to infallible force, but it's a peculiar notion of a market driven by this narrow rule,

which then ends up concentrating while to the extent that we end up creating what? well, let's just take food for example. there is more than about 20% to 30% depending witchery look at from the 1960s when i was writing "diet for a small planet" to today, there is one in 20% more food for each of us then it was back then. and yet we have history conger. so this concentration of wealth flowing inexorably from the assumptions with which i began and for creating the experience of scarcity no matter how much we grow, no matter how much we produce, almost a billion people on the planet today are going hungry. if you look at the u.s., the world's largest exporter cyberculture is and yet half of our children will be dependent on food stamps at some point in their childhood.

in another form of scarcity you can say is now at the swap the current wealth we end up with 10 corporations who control tremendous success of 2010, 10 corporations control half of the food and beverage products in our supermarkets. and of course not because they're bad people because of the logic that i'm describing, they returned to wealth has been from highly processed foods come up with that the pleasure centers so we become virtually take it to them. so where are we? we are the point where 40% of the calories are children each day are nutritionally empty. so that's another kind of scarcity, right? healthy nutritious food that we don't identify as they lack off to them, but their days. so what i'm suggesting is from the premise of scarcity we end up actually creating the

experience of scarcity. and then what happens? we say see i told you so. we really are just the selfish little competitors. that's who we are. and we see a few at the top with their riches and people struggling just to make ends meet. and it's not proof that human beings are just selfish? and what happens then is the just trust ourselves even more. if you look at the polls now, the distrust of one's neighbor is -- the trusted each other is declining as those that trust in government, radical tracks. ..

>> another way of seeing is emerging. another way of seeing life, ourselves in it, is emerging. it is taking shape. i want to take you around that spiral for a minute. it's a very different one. instead of the scarcity mind, the dominant mind, i see emerging what i call now the ecomind. instead of seeing the world as simply these separate entities streeting for not -- competing for not enoughness, what i sense in an ecological based view is science understanding and we're all connected moment to moment. that's the nature of life. we are all connected in a

process of continuous change, not a static reality we're competing over, but a continuous shaping of all the entities of every system moment to moment, so many great teachers influenced me, but i love the physiologist at oxford university in england who wrote the music of life, a beautiful little book, which he says, so well what i'm trying to say, he says, in bilogical systems, there's no prief ledgessed components telling the other what to do, but each development shapes interactions through all other elements shaped moment to moment by each other. in this world view, as my friend physicist, german, hans peter dure said, in this way of seeing, there's no parts, only participants. rather than these entities alone

fighting over not enoughness, we see ourselves moment to moment, co-creating reality through our active choices, and even our passiveness is shaping the world around us, so in the ecological world view, in the ecomind. the only choice we don't have is whether to change the world because we are moment to moment cocreating reality around us. i ask us, then, to look at the implications. let me start this spiral in the sky again from this premise that, in fact, rather than a lack, this interconnectedness of life in this continuous movement of life where co-creation is the dominant idea here, that from scarcity, we start with a premise instead of possibility. we start with the premise of possibilities. what do the ecomind tell us then

about human nature? remember the scarcity mind. it was critters and materialists. the ecomind says, yes, sure, that's really showing up. we see the incredible cruelty ce, towards one another. that's showing up a lot. from the ecomind, we also know we can look at the broad sweep of history. we look at the complexity and see that, in fact, the truth is that, yes, given certain conditions, most of us, not a few of us, but most of us will behave with incredible brutality. think about the holocaust. what was that about? it wasn't a crazed dictator who was just alone doing this. it was not a few sadistic guards doing this, but it was also very ordinary people. if you read the book "ordinary men" about battalion 101 from hamberg, germany, you realize

that here they were. you know, they didn't think themselves as violent people at all. they had not been trained, but they were sent into villages to kill jews point-blank. at first, most of them resisted, gradually more and more went along, until the end, 90% had committed murder. 38 million -- excuse me, 38,000 jews murdered and many sent to death camps. ordinary people. think of the stanford prison experiment, and we know that there 1971 and in the psych lab, there was people testing normal put into a mock prison setting that was supposed to last for two weeks. the professor had to stop it in six days because the students were brutalizing each other there were emotional break downs happening. it looked similar, so we can be

very, very cruel to one another. from an ecomind, though, we realize the evidence is equally clear that under certain conditions, we can behave incredible benevada lance. now, in fact, with the functional mris looking at our brains with certain activities, it's fascinating what they learn about us. for example, when people compete versus when people are cooperating, they found that when we cooperate, there are parts of our brains stimulated like we're eating chocolate. that's how delicious it is to cooperate. we also have tremendous evidence that fairness, basic fairness. many of you had little toddlers, you know, it's not fair refrain. we know that if things break down, 23 the unfairness enters into the community, then the community starts to fall apart,

and we are in tribes knowing that our own preservation depended upon the preservation of community, so we didn't want to break that apart with unfairness, so this deep need for fairness as well as we're also, i'm going to return to this in a moment, that we now know because of neuroscience that there's neurons in our brain so when i'm going like this, there's neurons firing as if you're doing that. that's how connected we are. that's the foundation of empathy. we have all of that to work with as well as our terrific need to make a dent in the world. as my mentor, eric fong put it, we have to ditch the idea of i think therefore i am, and it should be i am because i effect.

human beings are doers. we have the capacity for evil, and we have just the qualities we need to make a turn towards life on our planet from our villages and communities all the way up to the global level. i'm convinced that we have both. now, from the ecological perspective, though, we realize, oh, we're like any other species in the environment. it depends on the context. what is the context? what is being brought forth from us? what are the conditions? maybe a certain plant needs thatch water and sun. what do humans need? here i'm going out on a limb, but i'm suggesting that i have a clue of what are the conditions that bring out the worst and bring out the best, and i hope that i stimulate. there's three conditions to bring out the worst. they are concentrated power.

they are secrecy. we do not do well when we know nobody's watching. as we saw on wall street recently, when the traders on wall street creating those risky derivatives and pushing them off as good investments. you know one of the slogans i learned was ibg, ybg. i'll be gone, you'll be gone. we can get away with this because nobody's watching. we get millions, and we can be out of here. secrecy is to the a good thing with showing up with the better parts of ourselves. timely, cultures of blame. cultures, the idea that somehow it's very nonecological; right, that somebody is just a victim and somebody else is the perpetrator because from an ecological world view, if we're co-creators, all connected, then we'll all imp kateed; right? on come police sit in whan -- copolice sit in whatever is happening.

there's the tea party blaming obama, and republicans blaming democrats. from an ecological view, we're all responsible and all part of the solution or not. the conditions that bring out the worst in us are clear. if we figure out that, if we have a clue, then that, to me is liberation. we have some direction on what to do and create conditions that bring out the best in us, and we have something real to stand on and grounded in a great deal of reflection and what to learn about our species, so that is why i -- oh, and by the way, i was doing spiral in the sky because as we then begin to recognize we're both, we begin to think what's the conditions that bring out the best in us, and we start to create those, then we realize that we can have -- we can come together in real deliberation, we can come

together in problem solving. we can create a government responsible to us because we know how to remove the power of private wealth from our political system which was infecting the negative cycle terribly. we learn that we can do that because we begin to trust ourselves. we begin to build on that trust. i'll give examples of this in a moment, but that trust grows. we start out with the idea that we have the potential in us, under the right conditions. we start to create those, which i would argue, when central piece of that is removing the power of wealth from political decision making, and then we realize that, yes, there's a market that's open and fair and step up and set the values boundaries in which the market works. we recognize, the market left to its own devices ends up in monopoly that kills the market. actually, it's the citizens required to create a fair and

competitive market, and so we begin, i sort of like to think that we could reframe the idea of a free market as our freedom to participate in it, means we all have the wherewithall to keep it open and participate in it to meet our needs, and so from there, then, what happens is that our needs, we begin to create rules in which the market operates, so powers dispersed, and people have access to income, not all collected at the top, and then our confidence spills and we build trust which then becomes a virtuous cycling increasing in intensity, so that is what i'm suggesting is possible. as we go that deep to actually surface what are the assumptions that have been taking us down and how digging out those and beginning to frame them based on a more science, more evidence based view can give us what i

call not on optimism or pessimism, but rather i call myself a possiblist because i think from that point of view it is possible that we can do this. ultimate, ultimate challenge, this accelerating time to be alive where we can begin to align ourselves with what we know, and so my work now and this book "ecomind" is very much then about what happens as we make this shift towards and ecological world view, one of connection, continuous change in which we're all co-creators, trying to manifest the dispersion of power, transparency, and mutuality that is inherent in a viable ecosystem of humanity in my view. what does that look like? let me just give you a taste of what it means to shift from this scarcity mind to ecomind. from the scarcity mind and i

think that even, you know, many people i admire so much within the environmental movement, many of my heros that often put out, if not literally promote a frame that the problem is from the scarcity mind that we've hit the limits of a finite planet, and that is what is taking us down, and certainly if we are about to reach 7 billion people, i don't know if you've been listening to the radio recently and reading the papers, the feeling is, oh, my, 7 billion, we've hit the limits. let me just suggest what is my sense of the problem with that frame from an -- because it is trapped in the scarcity mind, and what is another frame that we -- is empowering and is arising. my, my sense is that limits frame, one, it increases fear in people, and we know from social psychology that fear itself makes people more self-centered

and materialistic, but it suggests that, one, if we cut back, hit the limits, then the real issue is just quantitative. we cut back. we heard about the plastic soup in the pacific ocean. i read it's the size of two states of texas, so, okay, we could cut that in half. would a plastic soup, would plastic debris and smothering of aquatic life, would that work if it were just one state of texas instead of two states of texas? i don't think we think so, so the limits frame keeps me in that quantitative, oh, we just have to cut back, cut back, but rather what we tbhoa from an -- know from an ecomind, it's about changing the system itself that generates the waste. the word "waste" reminds me of another problem with the

scarcity frame and limits being the problem. we think of the problem being out there, and we don't look at the fact -- oh, we hit the limits. with food, oh, we hit the limits to feed people. you hear that often. still, as i heard it 40 years ago, and, yet, we don't see the enormous waste built into our global food system where now less than half of the grain that we produce in our world goes directly to human beings. about a third goes to animals, which we know, you know, shrink its potential to feed us, and a third of our fish catch is now going to animals, so, yes, so that we are just taking this vast abundance and actively reducing it, and that's before you mentioned the fact that 30%-40% of the food is literally wasted in terms of its, you know, a lot of it because of the concentration of wealth, such poverty in the world that people can't store the food they grow

effectively, or you take energy from -- we've hit the limits frame, oh, wait a minute, how can we say hit the limits if science tells us anywhere from 55%-87% of energy produced in this country is wasted? the limits frame doesn't call us then to explore, to get curious about what is it about this system of concentration of decision making that ends up generating more waste than good, more waste than what we really want in both of these areas, certainly, and more. the other problem i see with the limits frame coming out of the scarcity mind is that when i hear that idea of, oh, we hit the limits of what nature can provide, i certainly understand why many people say, oh, we've got to do better than nature. we have to invest in genetically modified organisms, go for

geoengineering because we hit the limits of what nature can do. i understand how you jump to that conclusion if you heard and believe we hit the limits of nature, but rather we created a system of active destruction. that's what we got to be zeroing in on. from the hit the limits frame, what's the alternative? from the ecomind, in a way, all of my thinking now could be summarized from this shift from we've hit the limits, we have to cut back to we can align with the laws of nature including human nature as i pointed out including what we know about human nature, creating the rules that bring out the best in u and there's more than enough for all, and so we can reduce that sense of fear and panic. we can start to learn more and more about nature's laws, and more and more and more as we explore as we develop the courage to create new rules to

bring out the best in us. we can then see we align our societies with human nature, and unfortunately, unfortunately, the rules that we currently built from the scarcity mind actually manifests exactly the conditions bringing out the worst in us, concentrated power, secrecy, and blame game. what does it look like, then, to begin to align move from limits to alignment? i want to focus, for a moment, on food and farming because this is what makes my heart go pitter patter right now. what happens from an alignment frame, you start to privilege, you start to see the people you thought for a burden on the planet, who were just taking our resources away, and you start too see as our heros, oz our climate and our food heros. here's what i mean. if you look at the entire food system from ground to

supermarket, the estimate is that it is now contributing somewhere between 44% and 57% of greenhouse gases because of ights -- its intensive use of nitrogen fertilizer, transportation, and processing, ect., ect., and concentrated feed lot production, so that's not good. that's bad news. think of the possibility. the estimate is that if the world moved towards agro-ecology and reintegrated livestock into farming and relocallized our food system, that that in itself over decades could cut greenhouse gases in half. it is stunning the possibility, and 70% of the people producing food in the world today are small farmers.

we start to see small farmers enabled to move towards agro-ecological approaches using the latest we know about how to grow food, how to grow diversified crops, how to work with insects in ways that actually control harmful pests, how to work the soil to enhance organic matter, ect., ect.. we know that they are then a key to the solution. i want to go to the poorest country in the world, niger. it's below the strip of north african countries there, in the middle, the north african section, and that country had seen last year certainly as just nothing by a father and father and famine nightmare, and yet

over the last 20 years there, they regreened by nurturing trees as before they saw as a threat to production, but by nurturing the trees and keeping them growing in the fields they were growing food, that it increased the fertility of their fields, held the soil in place, and actually helped it create pathways to hold the water, and nutrients in the soil, increase that, as well as provided fruit and firewood. over less than 20 years, 200 million new trees flourishing on 12.5 million acres of land and providing food security for 2.5 million people. now, the researchers from whom i learned this talked about integrated farming, and i said,

why didn't i know about this? why isn't anybody looking at this? he said, nobody thought to look. again, the mental map. they saw this country as desperately poor, as losers, you know? nobody was looking through the satellite saying, oh, there's a region there getting greener. what's going on? i was so moved by listening to him quote the chief there in one of the villages in niger say we stopped the desert, and everything changed. women were more empowered because they learned a lot of the ecological approaches that did not depend on getting credit to buy special seeds or fertilizers because the women were often excluded from credit, so women were more empowered, people were coming back, schools were able to flourish because people could pay the fees for their children to go to school.

that's just one example of what can happen when we move from this frame of limits to alignments. for example, it means a great deal to me, but another example is from india. again, we often hear only about deforestation in the world, and yet as we align our social rules with nature's rules, what can happen? well, in india, devra davis -- authority in 10 million households engaged in community forestry, and that means they had the responsibility in their villages, these forest management groups, about 100,000 of them now in india where the villagers themselves are responsible for ensuring that the forest is not overused in a way that causes ongoing harm and degradation to the forest, and it's working so much so that

india is one of the few countries in the world in which there's an expansion of the health and the acreage of forests cover, so this is the kind of thing that happens when we align our social rules with what we know about the natural world. i see it also in brazil very much so that there -- what happened? i'll take you back to the hunger question. many in brazil are seen as one of the most hungry countries in the world even though it's wealthy because of the concentration. what happened when they declared food a human right? elected, in particular, in one city that my daughter and i visited, elected city government that ran on food as a human right and began to create social rules by bringing all the

different stake holders together, create new rules, not getting rid of the market, but keeping the market accountable and inclusive of the hungriest people so, for example, they said, okay, you small farmer, you can come in, sell your food at a local food stand on city owned land that we'll give you for virtually nothing to use if, if you keep your food within the reach of the forest people, and these councils brought together then all the diverse members of the community. this is a very large city, and the city invested one penny a day it turned out is what it worked out to be over the years in terms of each citizen in this large city, it was about a penny a day they invested in these multifaceted programs to make healthy food available. in one decade, they cut the death rate of babies and children by over 50% in one

decade on one penny per day per person of everyone in their city. another example of alining social rules with what we know brings out the best of us. instead of moving, instead of great abundance and yet scarcity, they began to make healthy food available, and now a new rule in brazil is that 30% of the food in schools throughout the country has to be supplied locally from small formers. these are the kinds of changes in rules. i'd like to end my talk tonight, and hopefully, we'll have time for discussion. i'd like to end with a very personal message about sort of what i think is most needed for us, the individual. i guess you know by know that i think human beings are good enough. i think we have in us the qualities we need. i didn't get to draw out all the

evidence, but there's menty of evidence that we are evolved in tightly knitted groups that we are finely tuned socially to be sensitive to one another. i think we're good enough, but i think we need to work on one core quality, and that core quality is what i like to call bold humility. by that i mean, that the boldness is this -- our social nature is a double edged sword for our species. in other words, we evolve in tightly knit tribes knowing our preservation depended on staying in the group; right? that's great if the group is on the right track, but what happens if the hypertribe, the larger tribe that we are as a species are a part of is heading right over victoria falls, metaphorically, but, okay, what happens? what happens? it means that separating from the pack is life, not death, but

it's still brings up that primal fear of separation from others. if we start to voice a different point of view. this is our -- this is the trick for our species, how, and maybe the most important of all, do you think maybe -- maybe we're the only species for whom fear response is hazard to our survival. think about it. if we let the fear of separation keep us with the pack and the pack is going down the tubes, that's not good. how do we rethink fear? how do we rethink fear? maybe at this moment in the 21st century, just, we have to think of it as an idea, just like the ideas of scarcity, and the ideas of possibility. what i mean, is we can take that energy of fear and use it, not be used by it. i have a very cheesy gimmick

that i use, and i will share with you, and that is that when i'm afraid -- can you hear that? it's loud inside me anyway, it's a pounding heart. for a long time, i got that for most of my life, and i would think, oh, you wimp. what's wrong with you? why are you so nor vows? i'm going to reframe this. i'm going to call it inner applause. [laughter] it works most of the time. [laughter] my thought is then that if we can -- if we can realize that those fear sensations may mean we're exactly in the right place at the right time doing just what we should do, but then how do we get more courage on a daily basis? there, our social nature can

really serve us well and our smarts. okay. if it's true, this neuron stuff, if we are mimicking ourselves inside of our brain patterns are mimicking what we watch, then we know how to get courage. we hang out with it. we choose friends that are risk takers in a positive way, hang out with them, watch them, and we try to be more that way, and it works. i'm convinced it works. it's worked my entire life, and so, and now, i have my children. they are risk takers, and so i love to try to model myself on them, so i think that that is very real, and also, just now because of the internet, we can bring stories of heros into our lives on a daily basis. we can choose, what i call is courage news diet, that we can

bring, we now have "yes" magazine, "solutions journal," others that can be delivered to your inbox, stories of possibility, and so here's what it is. the choice is up to us. i realize as i get to the end of my talk, i realized a few moments ago that i'd forgotten, and maybe this is part of my own fear problem, that i had forgotten to see -- forgot to mention what i see as a lynch pin and fear of life, and what's called living democracy. i forgot to mention the lynch pin. i talked about money in politics a bit, but i didn't convince you or try to convince you that it's really possible by giving you my superhero example. here it is. one of my heros whose picture i have in my heart and use many

times is a woman who, 11 years ago was a single mom and a waitress in auburn, maine, and she had a high school education, but her friends saw a lot of leadership in deborah simpson. they said, why don't you run for the state legislature? she said i don't have money or a name. they said, deb, we have public voluntary financing. 80% of the legislatures in maine run without corporate money. all you have to do, deb, is get $5 from 50 people, and you can run for office. oh, i'm a waitress, she said, i can do that. [laughter] she got it, she won, and she's been reelected four times. she's now become such a stellar representative and now a senator in the state of miens that she sat as co-chair of the judiciary

committee for the state of maine. her work and colleagues removed the power of corporations largely passed one of the most important pieces of environmental legislation, a producer speedometer law that's gone viral in other states and kept a pound of led out of that beautiful state for every single citizen in the state, so i took a tiny detour there to talk about deb for a minute because now at the national level, we have legislation somewhat modeled on the maps example that if we step out of our distrust of one another and government and begin to believe that we can have a government accountable to us, if we can get money out of the picture, then we can then up cyst that our legislature support is called fair elections now. it has 75 co-sponsors now in the house. we have to believe and do this, get money out of the system.

the bold part is this way of rethinking fear of stepping up, of knowing that we got to go to the root of the problem and being willing to do it no matter how much it takes that accelerating sense that we're going to the root, and what is the humanity part in my formulation? okay. the humanity part is easier when you are old like me. what i mean, by that is that some years ago, i realized, after my daughter and i traveled the world together to write "hope's edge," and i came home and said do you realize everything in the book i wrote about i would have given no comans of success when i was your age? she was 26 then. i would have been given no chance of success. that's really hum ling. that's really humbling, but think how liberating it is. if i give those initiatives no chance of success, then how can i today say that something's not possible? what i realized that i needed to do to keep that energy in my was

to make a checklist, make a checklist in my head of all of the things that most get me up in the morning, that most inspire the heck out of me, that i would have, oh, that's not going to happen, you know? for example, i grew up in texas, and in texas in the 1990s, the utility companies pulled together a citizens jury of ordinary people to weigh in on energy options, and they shifted their views and came to conclusion. they wanted to move towards renewables, this citizens jury, the segment of the population, you know, selective randomly selected group. they said that to the utility companies, and then they began to invest in wind energy, and i just learned that that is one of the reasons that texas has now become a wind energy leader help pushing the u.s. into wind energy leadership in the world,

and if i had srb if somebody had told me, you know, even 15 years ago, 10 years ago that that would be possible, i would say, no, that can never happen. texas? oil, not wind. what are you talking about? no way. i also think of another hero of mine, and maybe my hero that has done more for my backbone than anyone i ever met. that's the nobel peace prize winner who passed away a few weeks ago, but in 1977 on earth day, when he planted seven trees for seven environmental women leaders, now, if i had known him then and heard about that, i would have said, oh, how nice. isn't that nice? planted seven trees. i would have never believed that 20 years later that would grow into 30 million trees and then 45 million tree, and then what

he would inspire the united nation environmental program to establish the plant for the planet program. have you heard of that? well, not many have. some here have. plant for the planet program, there i go again. 2007, i heard about it, and i go, oh, they'll set the goal of a billion trees a year. oh, that's lovely, but could that really happen? i look back last year, and 11 billion trees. so when his seven trees planted in 177 in some ways moved to help directly inspire 11 billion trees. actually, the country that planted the most, you may never guess, is ethiopia, and the president congratulated the boy scouts for their great work on that campaign. what is the lesson here? the lesson that i would like to leave you with is the core lesson of an ecomind. if we really see the world in

continuous change and continuous co-creation in which we are all participants, not parts, but participants, in which the only choice we don't have, as i said, is whether to change the world, and then we have something that is, i believe, our ultimate freedom. we realize that it is not possible to know what's possible, and that is our freedom to go for the world we want. thank you so very much. thank you. [applause] [applause] thank you. [applause] [cheers and applause] thank you. [applause]

>> if you have questions, you can start it, whoever would like to go. [inaudible conversations] >> hi, i'm misty. >> hi. >> i had seen you earlier, and we were talking about occupy wall street, and i appreciated, i guess, your son's article called "don't think of a pig qtsz all about the framing of the occupy movement so it becomes more about its general assembly, more about showing people what democracy looks like, and i was just curious. in light of what's happened in the past two days in oakland with the protesters being attacked with rubber bullets,

tear gas, and then the pd denying what happened, it seems like there's been a lot of anger, so i was wondering, like, what could be a hopeful response for that brutality? even if you were not there, just watching the videos of being hit in the head with a tear gas canisterment he's still on conscious. what's a positive response that's not angry because there's so much anger at the sites and among the people just watching, so some advice? i don't know. >> well, i think just to contribute our energy to participate directly, that is the best response to any and every way to help contribute to the discussion so that, as you know, that piece, actually my son and i wrote it together, but that piece that anthony and i wrote together, was trying to

contribute to the reframe of rather than the blame game, that the reframe towards let's go to the root and remove the power of money from politics rather than blaming the greedy corporation because we are also participants in allowing that kind of concentration to take place. i think the only response that is taking place before this turn of events that is so ugly and painful, that i think the most constructive thing to do is to participate to show the support and contribute to the dialogue that turns this from protests to actual compelling visions of how to come together on really profound changes, and so i think -- so far, i feel, yes, there is a lot of anger motivating this, but there's

also been a lot of good will towards -- the speaker when i was there, we, the 99, we want to be contributors, we want to help, we want to be called on and to be useful and that was the message that i was hearing more than it was just pointing fingers at the other, so i think that any and every way we can work at and see a year ago and say, oh, wasn't that nice. i don't know if any of you want to go to washington on saturday, but there's going to be action starting at 11:30. i'll be speaking at 5:30. i don't know if anybody's going, but i'd love for you to keep me

company and help me figure out what to say in my 10 minutes. peek speak from -- people speak from 7:30 throughout the night saturday. this is organized by the coffee party, and by occupy -- [laughter] and by occupy wall street. coffee party is wonderful. it's not the -- the name kind of portrays its real purpose, which is to create an arena in which people of all persuasions can actually talk civilly, and you have to sign a civility pledge to participate in the coffee party, and i just think the world of the founder and just a very low key woman who just said, you know, there's got to be another way that's not screaming at one another. i really, coffeepartyusa is the website. i look at people, especially avenue looking at oakland, there's going to be more people there, and temptation to focus on just the outrage and how do

we use this because so many people are saying this is just the moment we need; right? i wrote ows throughout the notes, and i got into my ecomind thing and forgot to draw it in, but i feel it's an expression or can be an expression of everything i'm talking about, especially as we add in this message that we're all accountable. we all have to be part of the solution, not just pointing fingers, but thank you for that question. i wish i had a more easy answer, but thank you. hope there are other questions? >> hi. can you share a little more about your vision and how we can start to spread this mind set of the ecomind and start to change

people's mind without getting backlash, but having issues where people say, oh, that's just not going to happen. just skepticism. what is your idea or where you want to see us in a decade or so. >> right. you may have guessed the new encounter, the reflection of near dispair that people not wants to get hopes up just to be crushed again by defeat of feeling like it's hopeless, that the way that human beings learn is through story and to this day, i'm just -- just look -- you know, i'm looking, looking, looking for examples of living

democracy, i call it emerging, and there's so many. i could have gone on for hours and hours more. i just mentioned a few. i think finding and being a story teller, and you are an educator. everyone in the room is an educator, and just when you hear those words of dispair or words of just, oh, no, nothing can change, just reminding people that change has happened so radically. i did a radio interview with iowa public radio this morning, and one of the callers said, what are you talking about? where have you ever seen a country that had any kind of real dispersion of wealth in it? i had to remind him from my birth decade to my children's birth decade, mine the 40s, theirs the 70s that the lowest 20% of the population doubled their real purchasing power, that we were becoming a much more fair society, and this rapid consolidation of wealth is very recent, and i think for

it's harder for you to know it because it's many my bones growing up with a sense of possibility. in the 60s, we cut the poverty rate in half between 1960 and the early 1970s, we cut the poverty rate in half in this country. we look at a country like brazil, as i mentioned. they have cult -- cut their poverty rate from 20%-40%, depending what measure you take. that's incredible. austria has 18.5% of the agriculture land organ nick today. ours is less than 1%. this is happening. i think the more we can begin to directly get tastes outside of our own culture, and i'm you do that by traveling elsewhere, but just practices story telling and sharing of the stories, i think that is key, and just what you

exude, you know, what do you exude as a human being? a sense of possibility? not a blind hopefulness, but a sense of, you know, this is what human human beings are about, that it comes naturally to us to want to be problem solvers, so come join me in this rather than oh, you should, you no? i really think that's key. great, thank you. >> hi. thank you so much for sharing with us. i really like the -- the title of your book, "ecomind" in that it's supposed to be coming from the philosophy of ecology. one point that i wanted to ask about looking at the world as an ecosystem is that all loops are

closed and something you mentioned before in talking about your cycle is that there's a myth of accumulation and more and more and more, and a central aspect of what our economic system is based on is this idea of perpetual growth, and if we continue to grow our economy, that that is what's going to trickle down to everybody and make everybody happy and have access to all of their needs and their wants. given you push people to look at the world through the eyes of what an ecosystem is, do you talk about whether or not this frankly myth of perpetual growth is possible because when you look at an ecosystem, there's not perpetual growth, but cyclical growth, and i know you said you don't like writers or activists that talk about reaching the limits of what our environment can provide, and yet, if you're looking through

an ecological mind set, i think that there is some truth to cyclical opposed to perpetwall growth, and if you have anything to say about that and how the economies should function or how to view the solutions to meeting everybody's needs. >> great question. >> thank you. >> great question. did you all hear? yeah. that's very complex question and i'll try to summarize the answer this way that in -- the first thought trap in the book of no growth is the answer, and i try to reframe out of the growth, no growth all together because the problem with saying that growth is the problem is that it kind of blesses what we're doing now with a lovely term. i mean, i want my granddaughters to grow. i want my plants to grow. growth is a positive thing for people. if you say what we're currently doing is growth, when i argue that most of what we do today is waste and destruction.

there's more waste and destruction than growth in the sense of growth of equalities that most of us think is good about growth. i'd like to drop the term all together and call what we're doing now the economy of waste and destruction and to talk about what we want is an economy that's thriving because it's aligned with the cycles of nature that you're talking about. one of the things about the perspective is not just about cutting back on greenhouse gases; right? it's about riding the carbon cycle so we are not emitting more than we are absorbing, and so that we are in that way aligned, but that doesn't mean that we can't have thriving economies where many more of us, not fewer of us, have more of our needs met, so i think that is really what you touched on there, the cycles of nature and recognizing as was made so beautifully known in the first book that was popular in the

regard, cradle to cradle, that came out ten years ago, to talk about the whole system as one process feeds another, the whole concept of waste can be eliminated, and so, for example, i was in new york at the omega institute, any of you know that? they explained to us that over 36-hour cycle in that institute where many hundreds of people stay at any begin time, that 25,000 gallons of water used from toilets to kitchen to every other use, that over 36-hour period through putting that water through a microorganisms and plants we got to walk through, this greenhouse with the gorgeous plants, 245 within that -- that within that time it goes from waste water to water so pure it returns healthfully to the aquifer, and they told us we

should never use the word waste water. there need no be such thing. i think of going to colombia, the privilege i had years ago, meeting poor women taking waste from coffee, quite a bit in colombia, mountains of it, and they grew mushrooms with it. they were poor women who were gaining these new cooperative skills and building a local business there creating very high quality food, protein they added to their diet, and someone estimated if every coffee farm in the world did that, just had two jobs doing that, that's 50 million new jobs that was -- oh, and then they take the waste from the mushroom production, whatever is left, is fed to livestock. it's a continuous feeding system. you think of agri-ecology and

the grasslands and urban cycles, not just growth per se, but nature and aligning our activities with the cycles of nature. that's something of what i mean so that the limits frame that you mentioned that i was critiquing, i can certainly, absolutely -- you know, there are many ways 20 talk about it 6789 i'm just say -- there's many ways to talk about it, but i just prefer to talk about the problem in a different way because i feel if we just focus on limits, we think quality at a timively as -- quantitatively as we are filling something up, filling up the earth, but it doesn't help us see the way we destroy the regenretive power of the nature, we are just filling it up as we live without necessities. i'd love to continue the

discussion afterward, but it's a great question. thank you. >> i think we'll have time for book signing up here, so please join me in thanking frances. [applause] [applause] >> thank you, and let me say, also i'm very easy to fine. i love to converse with you about your responses to anything that i've said, anything in the book, my books at all. i work in cambridge, easy to find on the web, and it's info@smallplanet.org if you have any feedback. i appreciate you being here. the sign up sheet, if you want our occasional e-letter, please -- i don't know where it is now. >> we'll have it at the table. >> oh, great. thank you, thank you, thank you,

so, here, i will sign books. [inaudible conversations] >> it's author's night at the national press club. several authors here selling their books to support charity and one of those authors is jeremy ben-ami. booktv has covered mr. ben-ami, "a new voice for israel. >> it's a lobby, a new organization, three years old, pressing for american engagement to help achieve middle east peace. >> how do you stand compared to apac? >> well, we're a part of the jewish community that believes that peace and a two-state solution would be in israel's and the united states' best interest, and we want to see the

president do more, not less, to help achieve peace. >> so what is the new voice for israel? >> the new voice is to essentially provide a counterweight to some old voices that for too long have purported to speak for the entire jewish community and who have had positions on these issues that are more hawkish than the average jewish-american, and particularly for those who are 40 and under in the jewish community, supporting israel does not mean supporting every decision of the israeli government, and it doesn't mean taking the most hawkish possible view on every issue. >> what's the position that you do support that might be different than say what you say are the 40 and older? >> for instance, the president gave a speech in may in which he said the two states, israel and palestine, need to be based on 67 lines of pre-1967 border

between the west bank and israel. we think that's right. the president took a great deal of heat from organized jewish groups and other voices. he should have got support because that's the only way israel will survive as a jewish and democratic country is if it achievings a two-state solution on that basis. >> published "a new voice for israel: fighting for the survival of the jewish state." jeremy ben-ami, founder of j-street is the author. >> in my view, this is a time for america to get serious about our challenges, and i want to go through all of them, but the big one i started with is our budget and our spending. >> if entrepreneurs are not active, investment is not landing in your marketplace, then it's landing somewhere else. capital is